A Video Interview With Me

I was recently interviewed in the Doylestown Intelligencer newspaper about my "Rose Of Skibbereen" ebook series. They posted an excerpt of the interview at their Web site. In this clip I'm talking about the genealogy research that gave me the idea to write the novel. You can find it here.

A Toast To The Immigrants

St. Patrick's Day is coming, and every year around this time I start to think about the people I based my "Rose Of Skibbereen" series on. They are people from my family, my ancestors, and I learned about them through the meticulous genealogy research my mother did. She told me often about her old Irish grandmother, who died in the 1940s, and how she came over to Philadelphia as a young girl and worked as a servant in the houses of rich families. She had three sisters who moved here also, but she left a brother and a sister back in Ireland with her parents, and she never saw any of them again.

It was a hard thing the Irish did, the same as all immigrants do. They left their native land because of poverty, and they traveled thousands of miles to a new country, and often had to start out at the bottom rung of society, scrabbling to make a living the best they could. Many of them never had the money to buy a steamship ticket back to their homeland even for a brief visit, so they never saw their parents or the world they grew up in again. 

I think of that often when I think of my great grandmother, who is the person Rose is based on. She grew up in a rural part of Ireland in the 19th century, a place where there was no electricity, and none of the modern conveniences. I'm sure the first city she ever saw was Cobh, which was the town in Ireland where she boarded the ship to take her to America. Philadelphia, where she disembarked in the 1880s, must have seemed overwhelming, with all its traffic and people and sights and sounds. To make that transition, not only from one country to another, rural to urban, but also to live, like she did, for 60 more years and see all the changes that the 20th century brought, must have been a bewildering experience. When she died the world had been through two world wars, cars and airplanes had been invented, the telephone was a part of daily life, and there were a thousand other changes that must have made the world of her childhood seem like a dream. It's something I can hardly imagine, to see all that change in one lifetime, and even though I've seen some wonderful things in my life I haven't seen that rate of change. 

So, this year on St. Patrick's Day I'll lift a glass and toast my grandmother, and all the other immigrants who lived through so much. Because, through it all, they endured. 

I hope they found peace at their journey's end. 

Book Five of Rose Of Skibbereen Is Out!

Just in time for Thanksgiving, I have published the latest in my “Rose Of Skibbereen” family saga. This is Book Five in the series, and it takes the story through the 1980s and 90s right up to the dawn of the new millennium. The main character is Rosie Morley, granddaughter of Rose Sullivan Morley, the heroine of the first three books in the series. In this book Rosie moves to New Hope, Pennsylvania, and opens a bar and restaurant where she sings her beloved Big Band numbers. She also meets Jack Caldwell, a futurist, who captures her fancy with his optimism and his rugged good looks. Rosie’s son Pete gets into trouble in Northern Ireland, and for good measure there are some psychic overtones, some echoes of the spiritual music Rosie hears in her dreams. 

This series was based on some genealogical research I did, but at this point I’ve strayed far from that path. The characters are all fictional, of course, and their stories have developed in new and surprising directions. I think you’ll enjoy it!

What Genealogy Research Has Given Me

Rose Of Skibbereen would never have been written if it weren’t that I got interested in my family’s history. Growing up, I always liked to listen to my mother’s stories about her Irish grandmother, but I never really got bitten by the genealogy bug till my mother passed away and left me her folders of research, and some old photo albums. 

My mother did her research in the days before the Internet, when she had to take a bus downtown and pore through the Philadelphia City Archives. She spent hours at various government offices, she badgered bored city employees for help, she searched miles of microfilm and made copies on those clunky old machines that smelled like chemicals and took long minutes to make a shoddy, blurred copy. 

When I got involved it was much easier. I was able to search online databases and find records in a matter of seconds that my mother had to wait weeks for. I could connect with other people who had information about my family, and exchange photos and stories with them by email.

And it really got to me. Because what happened is I began to realize there were stories about these people, my ancestors, and some of them were quite tragic. There were men who abandoned their wives with small children, there was alcoholism and insanity, there was poverty, there was abortion, there were unwed mothers, there were immigrants who left Ireland as teenagers who never saw their parents or family again for the rest of their lives.

What I found was the gritty truth about my past. I grew up in the cocoon of suburbia, and I never thought anything dramatic happened in my family. I was wrong, though, because the generations before mine had lots of drama, although it was kept a secret from my generation. 

I got lots of material for my novel, although I used my imagination to embellish the facts in many cases. I got a new respect for the hardships faced by the people who came before me. And I got a new love -- genealogy -- that I’m thinking of turning into a second career. I love family history. Every family has its own secrets, its triumphs and tragedies, and every family is worth researching, I am convinced. 

It’s a project worth undertaking, and I highly recommend it. You may be surprised at what you find out when you do genealogical research, but I can guarantee you’ll get a deeper understanding of your family’s roots. 

If you want advice on how to proceed, contact me at mcdonnellwrite@gmail.com and if I can help you, I will. 

The Stories Are The Same

Many readers know that I based my “Rose Of Skibbereen” series of novels on some family history research, although I embellished the bare facts quite a bit. I got obsessed with finding out the truth about my great-grandfather Peter O’Farrell’s life and although I never did find out everything about him (like where he came from in Ireland), I found enough to quell my obsession for a time. 

Once the genealogy bug bites you, though, you’re never completely free of the desire to learn more of the story of your family’s past. My project now is to research a different part of my family tree, and I got a shock last week when I logged on to Ancestry.com and saw a picture of my mother’s maternal grandmother in someone else’s family tree. Ancestry sends you a link to another family tree if there’s a connection to your tree, and it’s a great help to your research efforts. 

Anyway, this person not only posted pictures from my great-grandmother’s family, she also had a short essay about my great-grandparents that sounded like it could have been written by me. You see, I’m always interested more in the stories than just the bare facts of genealogy, and my mother told me stories about her family that I always remembered. Like, that her great-grandparents were of two religious denominations: Baptist and Roman Catholic. She said that the Baptist father would not allow newspaper reading on Sundays, and he was also opposed to dancing and card playing. He did like ice cream, however, and he and his wife went out for ice cream every night in the summer. 

Those kind of details had to come from someone with a strong connection to the family! I dashed off an email immediately, and sat back and waited. 

And waited. I’ve had no answer yet, but maybe the person just hasn’t checked their email for a while. I do hope they check it soon, because I’m dying of curiosity.

I’ll let you know what happens.